Reliable and Efficient System for Community Energy Solution- RESCUES

25 million rural Indian households do not have access to electricity and the rest of the rural households face 4-5 hours of daily load shedding. In the UK, 17.2% rural households are fuel poor and it takes 10 times longer to restore power supply in rural areas than in the cities. While in India it is the inadequacy of infrastructure, the UK scene is dominated by network operation and control issues.
Most of these remote regions have local power resources but mainly intermittent in nature. Running such system in isolation requires storage and thus pushing the overall cost up. On and off grid through hybrid AC/DC micro grid concept is very revolutionary in this context. However, the operation in such mode does not come unchallenged.
The technical issues are low inertia because of small synchronous generators and inverter based generation, unbalanced demand, asymmetric network, false tripping of DG during mode transition, excessive harmonic distortion because of power electronics driven customer loads, etc. The challenges represent a major test of the power engineering community. This is because, in order to solve them, experts from different specialities - distribution system operation and control, power electronic converter design and control, energy storage must come together and fuse different enabling technologies for making smart distribution grid truly functional.
This consortium, drawing in experts from each of these technical areas, proposes to undertake fundamental technical research to fuse these technologies to make a community grid a reality. The overarching aim of this proposal is to invent appropriate, cost effective, scalable, secure and reliable local energy system.
The innovations include cutting edge converter topology, control design, practical application of ground breaking voltage and frequency control, innovation in thermal storage in demand management and the output of DG intermittency and advanced system operation tools. Four prototype laboratory based systems will be designed tested and validated to reflect four different geographical and climate situations influencing the resource availability and consumption trends.
In the short to medium term this project will establish and strengthen the collaborations between the leading UK and Indian universities engaged in research in power electronics, renewable energy, power distribution operation and control and energy storage. This will promote mutual understanding of the challenge facing the power system practices in order to meet the growing energy demand through increasingly intermittent local energy resources in the years ahead. Strong collaboration between the scientists in two countries will allow rigorous evaluation of challenges, technology and approach to address the problem of reliably operating power distribution systems of both countries. This will lead to novel and scientific understanding validated on different contexts and systems, which could not be possibly achieved by either side working in isolation. The research outcome will be well publicized in journal and conferences.
While it is clear that the uptake of this research primarily benefit the community living in the remote region, the other inevitable impact is employment opportunity for local people, business opportunity for various companies such as EoN, GE Energy, Siemens, ALSTOM GRID, ABB in the UK and in India, to name a few. In a time when there is a universal crisis for power engineers, the project will deliver trained researchers with broader expertise of working in this multinational collaborative project. Many of the investigators on both the UK and Indian side already enjoy healthy collaborative working relationships with industrial and utility partners primarily within their own countries. This programme will clearly move the research frontier and will drive technology development through such true multinational research collaboration.

In 2011, the UK Government accepted the need for more than £110 billion by 2020 to build and reinforce its electricity generation and grid infrastructure. Security of supply, decarbonisation of electricity, an anticipated doubling of demand by 2050 and rapidly rising energy costs are the driver. A great majority of this will be in the distribution segment. The investment of such scale has not been witnessed in the UK in the last 30 years. While, in India the planned scale of investment is £64 billion in the next five year alone. In the UK, India and many other countries worldwide active control of distribution system is getting the primary importance. While it is clear that distribution network operators such as UK Power Networks, various state distribution companies are intended to be amongst the major beneficiaries of this research, it is anticipated that the research would also be of interest to organisations such as GE Energy, E-ON, Siemens, ALSTOM GRID, ABB in the UK and in India, to name a few. Many of the investigators on both the UK and Indian side already enjoy healthy collaborative working relationships with industrial and utility partners primarily within their own countries and this programme will clearly deliver greater bilateral exchange. The major innovation in this research lies in efficient device and module arrangement, laying-out and system integration and overall device to system level efficiency improvement. The research deliverables will have impact on the technology development, supply chain and the ancillary industry sector, global research community, and most importantly on business models and smart-energy households developments.
The overall impacts of RESCUES technology on the India/UK lie in three areas, (i) technology development: growing opportunities for the manufacturing of smart-grid and energy storage technologies to avoid power cut to communities (ii) accelerated decarbonisation of UK/Indian and global power generation and (iii) offering a significant contribution for the power industries, and employment creation after several years of struggling economic recovery. This project will have direct impact on society and policy makers through knowledge exchange exercise, participating national roadmaps, and organising public events such as participating Open days, school outreach programmes, IET professional network events, through on-going UK-India research collaboration in Solar and BURD programme and through open access RESCUES website. The Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) will be established to ensure the commercial impacts of this project to be realised, which will have significant economic and employment impact.
The consortium will train about 25 researchers (UK PhD student funded by University of Exeter) to help meet the growing need for trained scientists in energy systems and renewable energy. In addition, people will be trained through excellent research promotion programmes and networks available both at Imperial College London, IIT Kharagpur. Several researchers in the consortium have on-going joint international research activities such as STAPP (Pal/Chakraborty), UKIERI and BioCPV (Mallick/Reddy) with India and LEAP (Mallick) with China. Those channels will be exploited to disseminate the research expertise gathered in the project and it will help UK researcher to establish strong international development.